Habitability and Life on earth:
Books, POSTERS AND Crafts
These resources will make the process of science real for students through engaging imagery and hands on activities. The list below includes links, suggested grade levels, and short descriptions. For more detail, click the title of each resource. Contact us to order copies at scooper@ldeo.columbia.edu or download your own for free.
BOOKS:
GRADES K-4 and informal
- This eBook introduces kids to some of the newest amazing discoveries of the JOIDES Resolution.
- This book introduces kids to the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that caused dinosaurs and many other species to go extinct. Readers will also learn about the scientific research expedition to the impact crater that helped us learn more about the mass extinction.
Posters:
GRADES K-12, undergraduate
Microfossils: The Ocean’s Storytellers
- This poster shows several different images of microfossils, taken through microscopes. The microfossils were found in cores recovered by the scientific ocean drilling vessel, JOIDES Resolution. The activities on the back of the Microfossils poster simulate the identification and use of these microfossils to examine past climate change and Earth history.
Grades 5-12
Discovering Life Below the Seafloor
- Science is a dynamic, non-linear, creative, and collaborative process that takes researchers on unique journeys of discovery. This poster highlights the pathway one microbiologist and her colleagues follow to unravel the mystery of what is living in the rocks and sediments that make up the ocean floor.
- This poster highlights the microbe Magnetotactic Bacteria
Microbe Poster: Hot Threads of the Deep
- This poster highlights the microbe Caldithrix Abyssi
Microbe Poster: The Hottest Life on Earth.
- This poster highlights the current world champion hyperthermophile: Methanopyrus kandleri.
- This poster highlihgts the microbe Archeoglobus Sulfaticallidus
Microfossils: The Ocean’s Storytellers
- This poster shows several different images of microfossils, taken through microscopes.
Sulfolobus Solfataricus Microbe
- This poster highlights the microbe Sulfolobus Solfataricus
- This poster highlights the microbe Thermosulfidibacter Takaii
- The artwork on this poster depicts research on microbe diversity in the deep biosphere. The activity on the back utilizes Lego blocks to model a method microbiologists use, called Fluorescence In-Situ Hybridization (FISH), to “tag,” identify, and study microbial diversity deep below the sea floor.
CRAFTS:
GRADES 5-12 and informal
- These embroidery patterns feature several different varieties of microfossils.
- These knitted patterns help to provide students and educators an example of what a microfossil looks like on a tangible scale. Crafting and the arts are incorporated in the STEAM movement as a means to be more inclusive of the ways in which many people learn to appreciate the scientific relationship between structure and function, and beauty in nature.